Off Season

A series of images shot in various times in the Black Sea resort of Mamaia, Romania, during the off season.

This series documents the seaside resort of Mamaia in the suspended time between two seasons — after the departure of summer and before the return of tourists. The photographs focus on temporary beach structures sealed, dismantled, covered, or abandoned in preparation for winter. Pavilions without roofs, empty lifeguard towers, folded terraces, improvised storage spaces, and skeletal constructions remain scattered across the shoreline like fragments of a stage after the performance has ended.

Removed from their seasonal function, these structures become quiet monuments to transience. Built for leisure, consumption, and spectacle, they now appear fragile and strangely autonomous against the vastness of the sea and sky. Their geometries echo minimalist sculpture or unfinished architecture, while the absence of people transforms the landscape into something suspended between documentation and fiction.

The series observes the Black Sea coast not as a destination, but as a territory of waiting. The emptied beach reveals another rhythm — one shaped by erosion, weather, labor, and cyclical disappearance. In this in-between state, Mamaia becomes almost unrecognizable: a place where entertainment infrastructures lose their identity and where silence exposes the artificial nature of the resort itself.

Shot with a restrained and distant gaze, the photographs explore themes of impermanence, seasonal memory, and the aesthetics of collapse. The pastel light, muted colors, and isolated constructions create a melancholic atmosphere in which these utilitarian objects begin to resemble ruins from an uncertain future.

Rather than documenting tourism, the series reflects on what remains when tourism pauses — on the vulnerability of spaces designed only for temporary occupation, and on the quiet poetry that emerges once human presence recedes.